Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Regenerative medicine utilizing conditioned media derived from cell cultures, such as stem cell cultures, increasingly attracts attention as a versatile alternative technique for treating diseases that are difficult to treat by conventional medicine. For example, one of the major unmet needs in medicine today is a treatment for diseases and conditions that involve complex, multi-molecular processes that cannot simply be replicated by administration of a single growth factor.
Experimental data of the use of conditioned culture media in the treatment of various diseases and health conditions have been accumulating in recent years. Several studies reported beneficial effects of stem cell therapy in degenerative diseases such as myocardial infarction and revealed that stem cells cause tissue repair due to their ability to secrete trophic factors that exert beneficial impact on the damaged tissue, rather than their capacity to differentiate into the needed cells. Various studies on stem cell-derived secreted factors have showed that the secreted factors alone without the stem cell itself may cause tissue repair in various conditions that involved tissue/organ damage. Further, it has been reported that stem cells provide the extracellular microenvironment with a wide range of growth factors, cytokines and chemokines, which are often broadly defined as the stem cells secretome and can include micro-vesicles or exosomes. In in vitro condition, these molecules can be traced from the conditioned medium or spent media harvested from cultured cells, and thus the medium comprising these secreted cellular factors is called conditioned culture medium. Conditioned medium now serves as a new treatment modality in regenerative medicine and has shown a successful outcome in some diseases.
As technologies advance and stem cell lines and other requisites become available, there is a continued need to develop formulations for treatment of tissue related diseases and associated symptoms. The use of secretome-containing conditioned culture media have several advantages compared to the use of stem cells, as conditioned culture media can be manufactured, freeze-dried, packaged, and transported more easily. Moreover, as described in some particular alternatives of the present disclosure, as conditioned culture media are devoid of cells; there is no need to match the donor and the recipient to avoid rejection problems. Therefore, conditioned culture media have a promising prospect to be produced as pharmaceuticals for regenerative medicine.